Since last post there has been a lot of progress, I have had more experience with Pygame and found some documentation and tutorials on how to properly set up buttons using visual assets. Initially in my past documentation I was able to add some buttons I created in Illustrator and make them functional in controlling the state of the simulation. The next step is to work more closely with teammates in integrating it with the back-end code so that the user interface is actually referring to real objects instead of a ‘dummy’ object bouncing around the screen.

Here are some screen grabs of the project so far starting with the main menu:

As I work more in integrating it into the back-end, the complexity of the menus will increase, and there will be live updates to the statistics associated with each organism where when they are clicked on one can view each attributes. Our team also mulling over adding some functionality to the environment itself visually with bonuses related to being in a specific environment and I think it would be interesting to add some UI elements to those features where those buffs or potential debuffs can be seen, or even an overall description e.g. “The water slows down land creatures by 40%”. Overall it has been a productive week and I am looking forward to getting a visual going on the simulation end.